During the golden years of the; 50's 60's and 70's, Carl Davis, was one of Chicago's hottest music producers and record executives to ever blaze the trails of Chicago's renowned Record Row. This action packed memoir chronicles his rise to prominence and power in a dazzling yet cut-throat music business where only the strongest survived. Mastering the art of cutting a deal to the artistry of cutting wax, Davis' visionary leadership helped forge the legendary Chicago-Sound. From the stage of Chicago's famed Regal Theatre to the bright lights of concert venues throughout the world, his artists were some of the brightest stars of our time. No longer an unsung hero, this autobiography punctuates the tireless efforts and the timeless contributions of one of America's greatest music producers and record company executives. To many he was a friend, to others a businessman, but to his artists and fans throughout the world - he is and will always be - the man behind the music.

Set amidst the political upheaval of the McCarthy trials, the Vietnam War, and the rise of the women's movement, Intimate Politics is a courageous and uncompromising account of one woman's personal and political transformation, and a fascinating portrayal of a key chapter in our nation's history. At eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House on Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Born into one of the most influential U.S. Communist families whose friends included W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina lived her parents' politics witnessing first-hand one of the most dramatic upheavals in American history. She also lived with a terrible secret: incest at the hands of her famous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions. A gripping and beautifully rendered memoir, Intimate Politics is at its core the story of one woman's struggle to still the demons of her personal world while becoming a controversial public figure herself. This is the story of childhood sexual abuse, abortion, sexual violence, activism, and the triumph over one's past. It's about FBI harassment and persecution, Jewish heritage, and lesbian identity. It is, finally, about the courage to speak one's truth despite the consequences and to break the sacred silence of family secrets.

"This is the colorful memoir of the brilliant, eccentric Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill (1865-1951), who championed many of the emerging masters of modern art in the first part of the twentieth century. In this, she was radical and pioneering. She made the first sales in Paris for Picasso and Matisse, and she gave Modigliani the only solo show in his lifetime. Weill also promoted the work of women artists, and her salty memoir (originally published in 1933) details her struggles against sexism and anti-Semitism in the Parisian art world. This text has long been mined by historians for details about the Paris art scene at the turn of the twentieth century, but beyond that, Weill is little known because she was too poor to publish lavish catalogues or invest enormous sums in grooming artists and purchasing their work-which is how most art dealers operated. At the same time, she appears over and over in numerous artist biographies depicted as a colorful figure with an uncanny nose for sniffing out talent"--

Sheet music, lyrics, stories and images for 56 original Ben Sidran compositions. Ben Sidran is widely recognized as the host of National Public Radio's landmark jazz series "Jazz Alive", which received a Peabody Award, and as the host of VH-1 television's "New Visions" series, which received the Ace Award for best music series. A pianist, producer, singer and composer, he has recorded more than thirty solo albums, including the Grammy nominated Concert for Garcia Lorca, and produced recordings for such noted artists as Van Morrison, Diana Ross, Michael Franks, Rickie Lee Jones, Mose Allison and Steve Miller (with whom he co-wrote the hit song "Space Cowboy"). He is the composer of the soundtrack for the acclaimed film Hoop Dreams, and scored the documentary Vietnam: Long Time Coming, which won both the Aspen Film Festival audience award and an Emmy. Sidran has authored two books on the subject of jazz, Black Talk, a cultural history of the music, and Talking Jazz, a series of conversations with inspirational musicians. He holds a PhD. in American Studies from Sussex University, Brighton, England, but has studiously avoided the academic life, preferring instead to spend his time performing, producing and writing. His latest works include the memoir, A Life in the Music, the groundbreaking text There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream, and The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma, along with the recordings Picture Him Happy and Swing State.

Brings together the best work from across the spectrum of Jewish interest, including articles, essays, short stories, poems, polemics, personal memoir, sections of novels, and other writings on a broad variety of topics.

In Myself When Young, Arthur Krock returns to a way of life only briefly explored in his Memoirs, to a time and a place long past, yet here richly and fully recaptured. From 1887 to 1910, Krock grew up in the fields and streets of rural and urban Kentucky, learning about the world around him, and eventually, about the particular world of newspaper journalism. With a keen eye and a clear prose, Krock brings back those days — the lazy summer afternoons and sense of community of rural Glasgow, the bustling excitement and activity of Louisville. He recreates the big brick house he lived in, surrounded by uncles and aunts and ruled by the strict but gentle hand of his grandfather; the rituals of country courting and of melon-patch raiding in August; the pleasures of a very infor- mal type of fox-hunting, in which the hounds and handlers went chasing while the "hunters" sat on a hill and drank bourbon. He recalls fiery camp meetings, led by Negro preachers and filled with spirituals; tumultuous Saturday nights, when normally peaceable citizens displayed a "special inclination to violence under the influence of alcohol"; breezy stagecoach rides to near-by villages; and the exciting process of learning the "three useful things" — how to ride, shoot, and draw a bow. And then he moves to Louisville and the picture changes to the rough-and-tumble world of newspaper reporting with its legendary figures like editor Henry Watterson, with his one blazing blue eye, and cartoonist Fontaine Fox, creator of the Toonerville Trolley. He creates a penetrating portrait of the fierce newspaper competition in 1907 and of Louisville in general: its atmosphere, social life, and entertainments, its prominent personalities and characters, like Mother Savage, the proprietress of Louisville's famed theatrical boarding house. And Krock talks about his initiation into politics, his stories resounding with the likes of William Jennings Bryan, William Taft, William Randolph Hearst, and local figures like the "mountain of a man," Senator Ollie James. The book ends with Krock's triumphant arrival in Washington, D.C., in 1910, the beginning for him of a "new and awesome phase of national journalism that was to post me twice in Washington: for the Haldeman papers (1910-1915) and for the New York Times (1932-1966)." This is a warmly nostalgic memoir of another age, a book both entertaining and informative about the details of Arthur Krock's personal life — and about the whole way of life of the simpler American society that preceded World War I. "There have been localities in a span of history in which the conditions of living seem to have overbalanced the human bent for destruction and the day-to-day problems were minimal in comparison with the pleasure of existence. This was true of the region where one individual, myself, grew to young manhood."

"A rapturous, witty, and passionate memoir ... Violin Dreams is not only the story of a man becoming an artist, it’s a history of twentieth-century music.” -- John Guare, Tony Award-winning playwright Arnold Steinhardt, for more than forty years an international soloist and the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, brings warmth, wit, and fascinating insider details to the story of his lifelong obsession with the violin, that most seductive and stunningly beautiful instrument. His story is rich with vivid scenes: the terror inflicted by his early violin teachers, the sensual pleasure involved in the pursuit of the perfect violin, the charged atmosphere of high-level competitions. Steinhardt describes Bach’s Chaconne as the holy grail for the solo violin, and he illuminates, from the perspective of an ardent owner of a great Storioni violin, the history and mysteries of the renowned Italian violinmakers. Violin Dreams includes a remarkable CD recording of Steinhardt performing Bach’s Partita in D Minor as a young violinist forty years ago and playing the same piece especially for this book. A conversation between the author and Alan Alda on the differences between the two performances is included in the liner notes.

Amy Wallace's memoir of her complex relationship with Carlos Castaneda plunges readers deep into the reality of the Castaneda cult and the psychological terrors it perpetrated. With the skill of a master storyteller, Wallace recounts early meetings with Castaneda, shares previously unpublished material straight from the Nagual, and explores the aftermath of Castaneda's death and the long term effects of his legacy. Insightful and unwaveringly honest, Sorcerer's Apprentice is simultaneously a love story, a cautionary tale about the dangers of giving one's power to another, and a joyous account of healing and self-affirmation.

One day it happens: the dreaded event that will change your life forever. For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened in a remote seaside cabin on a coastal Maine island—where the very isolation that makes for a perfect artist's retreat can also put life at risk. Shulman woke to find that her beloved husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same—but not the same. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes the ongoing anxieties and risks—and surprising rewards—she experiences as she reorganizes her world to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich.

'Enlightening ... Funny, smart, original and provocative ... It is hard to imagine the stalwarts of Mock the Week recognising the Druze militia leader Walid Jumblatt in a London cinema' NEW STATESMAN 'Few standups have come close to capturing a fraction of this creative energy in a book ... Alexei Sayle is an exception' GUARDIAN "What I brought to comedy was an authentic working-class voice plus a threat of genuine violence - nobody in Monty Python looked like a hard case who'd kick your head in." In 1971, comedians on the working men's club circuit imagined that they would be free to continue telling their tired, racist, misogynistic gags forever. But their nemesis, a nineteen-year-old Marxist art student, was slowly coming to meet them... Thatcher Stole My Trousers chronicles a time when comedy and politics united in electrifying ways. Recounting the founding of the Comedy Store, the Comic Strip and the Young Ones, and Alexei's friendships with the comedians who - like him - would soon become household names, this is a unique and beguiling blend of social history and memoir. Fascinating, funny, angry and entertaining, it is a story of class and comedy, politics and love, fast cars and why it's difficult to foul a dwarf in a game of football.

Agnes Bernelle, one of Ireland's best-loved stage performers, was born Agnes Bernauer in Berlin in 1923, the daughter of a renowned Jewish-Hungarian theatre impresario. In this sparkling, intimate memoir she recounts her early years in Germany, her family's flight to London after Hitler came to power, her anti-Nazi broadcasts to the land of her birth, her turbulent loves and family life, the blossoming of her career in film and theatre - from wartime refugee cabaret to the West End - and her eventual move to Glaslough in Ireland in 1963.

In 1980, Abe Burrows published his memoir, Honest, Abe: Is There Really No Business Like Show Business?, in which he recalls the meat of his career, including his mentoring of several comedy writers including future M*A*S*H writer Larry Gelbart (who was once a Duffy's Tavern writer), Nat Hiken, Dick Martin and Woody Allen, the latter a distant cousin of Burrows'.

Step into the halcyon world of pre-war England through the eyes of George Sherston, the fictionalized alter ego of poet and war hero Siegfried Sassoon. In "Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man", Sassoon masterfully captures the innocence of youth, the thrill of the hunt, and the deep, abiding connection to a countryside untouched by the horrors of the Great War. Through Sherston’s adventures—on horseback and off—readers are immersed in the gentle rhythms of country life, the camaraderie of the hunting field, and the quiet introspections of a young man coming of age. Yet beneath the light-hearted tales and sporting escapades lies an undercurrent of change, as the encroaching reality of war looms over this idyllic existence. Sassoon’s prose is at once nostalgic and sharply observant, offering a portrait of an era and a generation on the cusp of irrevocable transformation. Whether you are a lover of classic literature, historical fiction, or poignant coming-of-age stories, this evocative narrative offers both a window into a vanished world and a powerful commentary on the innocence lost to war.

It was Gold who led the fur workers in their historic 17-week strike in 1926 in which, against all odds, they became the first workers whose union achieved the 5-day, 40-hour week...

A distinguished historian, Harvard professor, and White House adviser looks back on his own life and on the tumultuous twentieth century. Sixteen-year-old Richard Pipes escaped from Nazi-occupied Warsaw with his family in October 1939. Their flight took them to the United States by way of Italy, and Pipes went on to earn a college degree, join the U.S. Air Corps, serve as professor of Russian history at Harvard for nearly forty years, and become adviser to President Reagan on Soviet and Eastern European affairs. In this engrossing book, the eminent historian remembers the events of his own remarkable life as well as the unfolding of some of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary political events.From his youthful memories of bombs falling on Warsaw to his recollections of the conflicts inside the Reagan administration over American policies toward the USSR, Pipes offers penetrating observations as well as fascinating portraits of such cultural and political figures as Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Reagan, and Alexander Haig. Perhaps most interesting of all, Pipes depicts his evolution as a historian and his understanding of how history is witnessed and how it is recorded.

Autobiography of Puah Rakovsky, who broke from traditional upbringng to become a professional educator, Zionist activist, and feminist leader in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Poland.

A world-class pianist, composer, television and film personality, Levant seemed to know everyone who was anyone. His career took him from the concert hall to Broadway and Hollywood, to radio and television, to drug addiction and the psychiatric ward of Mt. Sinai hospital. Through a collection of anecdotal vignettes, Levant offers the reader a roller-coaster ride through the ups and downs of an often troubled, often brilliant artist and critic of the human condition, let loose on the uneasy ground where art and commerce overlap.

Autobiography of this notable peace campaigner, focusing on his political and social activities. Discusses his work to foster peace in the Middle East and his involvement with many organisations working in the interests of peace and social justice, such as the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism. Gives an account of his interactions with many political leaders and also provides a record of post-war left-wing political movements in Australia. Includes index. The author is the founder of the journal 'Paths to Peace'.